COMMENTARY

Family living: Loving guidance

Friday,  January 13, 2006

Parents today have a tremendous challenge. If we are on this planet at all, we must recognize that we face an increasingly difficult time rearing children and guiding them with love in to the right way of life.

We cannot deny the awesome responsibility of seeking the best ways to shape and mould our children into the acceptable persons we want them to become, encouraging them to develop good habits, and helping them to weed out undesirable ones. Our children simply cannot be left alone to do or say whatever they like.

Parents have to be proactive in helping the children to shed the kinds of behaviour that if left alone, will bring pain and heartache to the parent, the child, and perhaps even the community on the whole. 

Clearly, the tendency we have of refusing to curb our children, allowing them instead to speak to us without any respect in there voices or attitudes, is right now being taken a little further by the children to include disrespect to all different levels of authority over them.

Teachers, youth workers, and various other adults who have temporary responsibility for the children, struggle to maintain order and to provide for our children the kind of environment in which they can be nurtured, often because there is so little support from the homes from which these children come. 

Not only are the children, when they are at home, allowed to say anything about these authority figures, but the parents who should be correcting their attitudes, join in and in effect encourage this type of disrespect.

It is a sad commentary of our times, when parents join in to verbally abuse and even physically threaten those who represent agencies seeking to help our children, and who in effect should be seen as members of our team. 

When we try to intimidate and bully folk whose desire it is to assist us in the moulding process of our children, we are making a very serious mistake for which we will pay later, often with tears and regret.

Parents often underestimate the significance of their influence on their own children. It is true that peers have a part in shaping our children’s thinking and behaviour; however, the most significant input into the rearing process is from the parent. 

Without the love, the material and social support of the parent, without the guidance the painstaking correction, and without the sense of a security network provided by other agencies outside of the home, there is little chance of success. We must live and operate in a community!

We need to realize that our children do not always act appropriately. We should assist those who are trying to help them, instead to so swiftly and misguidedly trying to defend our “little darlings”. 

We should never be guilty of listening to their side of a story only, regardless of how convincingly it is presented to us. There is always another side to every story even to their story!

As we seek to lovingly guide our children, let us ask God for wisdom to differentiate between love and indulgence guide our children, because the one is helpful and the other definitely harmful.

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